But make some room in your tote bag for this: "Bobcat," a slim volume of short stories by a prodigiously talented writer, Rebecca Lee. Her work is at once effortless and exacting, sophisticated and ribald.

And when individual stories last for only 30 short pages at a go, you can close the book — and your eyes — and lie back on your chaise to consider it.

The lead story, "Bobcat," is a prickly, affecting, hilarious and razor-like slice through a Manhattan dinner party attended by friends with shared histories, ambitions and secrets.

In it, a couple wobbles their way through preparing the kind of meal they think they should serve their guests: a terrine from "Food & Wine" magazine (which "rightfully should be made over the course of two or three days—heated, cooled, flagellated, changed over time in the flames of the ever-turning world, but our guests were due to arrive within the hour:); a roast "with an infusion of rosemary, palm and olive oils, and a nutty oil made from macadamias."

As the guests arrive, they reveal themselves as an entertaining, potentially toxic blend of couples, paramours, sharks and mice — one woman a serene-seeming Swede who'd sacrificed one arm to a bobcat during a Himalayan trek, or so she said; another woman a perceived sexual threat to the hostess' marriage; a charmless man whose affair with his officemate is known to everyone except his wife, who also happens to a descendent of the Donners.

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(Yes, those Donners, the alleged cannibals, though Kitty Donner denies the claim: "There's no evidence in the fossil record.")

Relationships can crumble, or be mortared, in the course of a meal shared with friends, as Lee so skillfully exposes:

Every dinner party by the end is a bit of a defeat. After the halfway mark, when everybody is still in high-spirits, some even intoxicated, and the dessert still hasn't arrived, there is a moment when it seems like we are the most interesting dinner party in Manhattan tonight, we love each other, and we should do this all the time, why don't we do this all the time? Everybody is calculating when they can invite everybody to their house for the next dinner party.

But then there is the subtle shift downward. Somebody is a little too drunk. The bird, which was a bronze talismanic centerpiece, golden and thriving, is revealed as a collection of crazy bones.

This story is worth the price of the collection, though the other offerings are moving and strong. Lee, crafty and humane, infuses her characters like her roasts, with an array of flavors and textures.

The aggregate makes for a rewarding volume, one destined for dog-eared-ness as it gets passed around the pool.

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